Have you noticed that over the last twenty years of so that color has been disappearing from our lives? I’m not talking about natural color; fruits, vegetables, sunsets, flowers, trees, and falling leaves are still as vibrant as ever. What I’m talking about is color in our man-made world.
I hadn’t noticed this until it was succinctly pointed out in various memes. But if you take a moment you’ll notice that everything has adopted a decidedly monotone color palette. While I was waiting for the light to change on my way to a doctor appointment yesterday, I looked around ,and with the exception of a single maroon car on the opposite side of the intersection, I was surrounded in a sea of white, black, silver, and gray. As I drove on, this continued, punctuated by only a single blue vehicle. To paraphrase Henry Ford’s famous quote about the Model T, “You can have any color you want, as long as it’s white, black, silver, or gray.” The only exceptions to this grayscale rule (granted I did not visit every manufacturer’s website to verify this was uniform across brands), were MINI, JEEP, and the Chevy Corvette. Even then, the craziest colors offered (from JEEP alone) are bright orange, lemon green, and a deep purple. (If you’ve seen these in the wild, you’re not likely to forget them.) They were also uniformly an additional $600-900 per vehicle.
Thirty years ago the streets were swimming with color.
What about our interior spaces? Again, we seem to have boxed ourselves into a monochrome hell, with stone floors, white, gray, or black marble countertops, and white or black cabinets. This black and white palette was something I wholeheartedly embraced in the mid 80s, but at that time it was almost impossible to furnish your space only in black and white. If you want color on your floors, you can get different shades of brown stained hardwoods, but that’s the extent of it. Kitchen appliances? Forget the 1940s and 50s with their pink and aqua, or the lemon yellow so popular in the 60s, or even the 1970s harvest gold, avocado, and coppertone…or ven the 80s almond. Now you have a choice or white, black, or your most likely only choice, brushed stainless steel.
If you look at any of the architectural interior photos I’ve posted, all of them are uniformly white (or gray) walls, with the only color appearing in their furnishings
Clothing? I went into Target several years ago to buy some polo shirts (because of their cost and the way they fit me) and discovered I had a choice of black, white, heather gray, slate, or brown. It’s no wonder I started buying second hand IZOD at the time; they’re at least available in a rainbow of colors.
Am I just losing my mind, or have you noticed color slowly disappearing from our lives as well?
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